Richard Sever

Preprints of pandemic potential - new historical piece from me on the history of bioRxiv/medRxiv, their role in the pandemic, and the way forward. 1/n journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Show a picture on your phone that has your energy but isn’t a selfie.

"A single mutation could...spark a pandemic...deadlier than COVID-19...Instead of trying to stop the outbreak and prevent it from spilling into humans...officials have done little except try to keep its existence quiet" www.propublica.org/article/bird...

Ebola spreads to a 4th country www.theguardian.com/world/2026/o...

My lab hosted department happy hour tonight and had a fun party game

"The danger..is not a shortage of data..but the illusion that the data speak for themselves. [Meanwhile] few scientists actively try to disprove their own favored theories." A reminder a) data =/ knowledge, b) interpretation & falsification are key. www.life-science-alliance.org/content/10/1...

Also: of those who said "yes", 2% named Elon Musk..

Stay tuned for our Super Intelligence policies. Obviously they will be better

“On ChatGPT, rating a response with a thumbs up or down can make the entire associated conversation eligible for training even if you’ve opted out” Most importantly: “If it’s really sensitive, consider not using AI” www.science.org/content/arti...

In new study, we show that SARS-CoV-2 has evolved decreased inherent antigenicity in humans, as quantified by a ~3-fold decrease in the number of naïve human B cells that can bind the spike RBD. doi.org/10.64898/202...

And with the spectrum of emerging AI review tools, novelty will clearly become an aspect judged/quantified/ranked/selected. So the drive for novelty will only increase. It just won't be Nature Editors who are blamed... 2/2

Yeah - I guess the question is if it will ever be important enough to influence how research is performed or written - because that is what gaming would entail. But researchers already lament journals' (and funders') obsession with novelty. This may just make that worse... 1/2

Why medRxiv: "Despite the FDA’s endorsement, many clinicians were hesitant..The solution was to post a preprint on medRxiv. Once it went online [they] began to adopt the method, making COVID testing more tolerable..before the peer-reviewed version was published" connect.biorxiv.org/news/2026/08...

You Can See Everything "treats [Holmes'] misstatements as more debatable than they were...There are facts here, and they’re being brushed aside" www.statnews.com/2026/10/20/e...

In other words, it would be inadequate if that were all that were happening, but scrutiny by the community follows - that's the point. The decisions about what to exclude in the first place (screen out) versus have community assess (sunlight) are what we are talking about - and opinions vary... 3/n

Recall we are talking about preprint servers here. The aim is not to provide a source of validated peer-reviewed 'academic truth' but to try to exclude obviously false information and glut of zero value at all so what is posted can be critiqued, which may include pointing out false references.. 2/n

"Automated customer service systems...are driving us crazy...getting actual help requires a Homeric quest past a morass of junk...AI is starting to make a bad situation worse" www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/o...

ASHG FOMO as the “Where are you?” texts arrive 😢

THIS Or apply a level of trust many are not comfortable with or, worse, trust only things by certain people, which even fewer should be comfortable with and the PubPeer experience tells us is naive...

I think my ability to detect falsified data in genomics disappeared 20 years ago at least. Seriously, nobody checks if data are real in massive datasets - how even would you? We have had to take data on faith for a long time, a major reviewing issue but I don’t see a fix.

"Verification is complicated by model opacity and continuous training...it’s really hard to claim that we produce a replicable and reproducible science that will [yield], with the same inputs, the exact same outcomes" www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/u...

"Historically, falsified data contained human tells...Modern models are capable of producing synthetic data, graphs, and images with convincing realism, leaving human reviewers largely blind to fabrication" www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/u...

Virtual workshop on generalist data repositories coming from GREI medium.com/@blog-grei/t...

Retracting then republishing a corrected paper recognizes the reality that errors are made but can be corrected (though blurs the line with Corrigenda). Similarly we see Withdrawals on biorxiv/medRxiv that are subsequently updated with a corrected paper. retractionwatch.com/2026/10/15/j...

If he saw the world with a blue tint, why would he not see his paint palette with that same tint and thus create paintings we see without it?

As I was taught as a graduate student 40 years ago by Gerd Jürgens: “If you can’t convince them, confuse them. And if you are short of data, use color.” (color 1986 = fancy graphics & figures with dozens of panels 2026)

"Because manuscripts reflected real progress towards our field’s goals, our assessment systems began relying on them as primary metrics...which is obviously flawed...Generative AI has broken this already-flawed proxy completely" journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

You know a gene is selfish when its DNA twists the wrong way, as demonstrated by the left-handed double-helix proudly adorning the 50th Anniversary Edition of the multimillion copy bestseller on this topic.

Very nice discovery from the Jackson, Bravo and Basel labs. Cleaved tRNA ends, loaded with an amino acid, activate a form of bacterial immunity

The DOI registration agency Crossref is holding elections for Board Members. I've worked with Crossref for years, and preprints are now a major class of object registered. IMO it's valuable to have that experience represented so am a candidate. Vote for me! www.crossref.org/board-and-go...

Fantastic visit to Princeton to talk preprints and the future of publishing with faculty, post-docs and students. Thanks so much to @ctmurphy1.bsky.social and colleagues for hosting me!

In response to the government’s renaming of AI to SI, I propose all journals rename Supplemental Information to Additional Information.